Discovery

For more than two decades, researchers have wrestled with something akin to a unified theory of archeology. Put forth by Colin Renfrew, the “farming-language dispersal hypothesis” suggests that farming helped spread language and culture through Europe, Africa, and Polynesia.

The claim, formalized with Australian Peter Bellwood, was appealing in its elegance, if not a bit brash. As Renfrew wrote in the 1996 The origins and spread of agriculture and pastoralism in Eurasia, the ancient distributions of language and farming are so closely related “that an adequate understanding of world genetic diversity and its origins will scarcely be possible without an insight into this fundamental relationship.”

Washington State University molecular biologist Brian Kemp has spent several years extending the hypothesis into the Southwest and Mesoamerica, between central Mexico and Central America. Scholars have long noted a relationship between past and present people in the two regions, the farming of maize, and shared words of the Uto-Aztecan languages.

Writing first for his UC-Davis doctoral dissertation and now the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kemp explored the possible genetic connections that might be another brick in the wall supporting Renfew’s hypothesis.

Using DNA samples from Uto-Aztecan speakers in the two regions, Kemp looked at both mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mothers, and Y-chromosomal DNA, which is held only by men.

The mitochondrial DNA doesn’t do much for Renfew’s hypothesis. Women were more closely related to non-Uto-Aztecan speakers in their areas. This, Kemp says, “suggests that no matter which way the language spread, it didn’t spread with females.”

But when he looked at the male DNA, he saw genetic links between men in the two regions. He can’t say which way their genetic material spread. However, he says, “it seems to have been spread by the males, not the females.”

Leaving, well, a mystery. It’s easy enough to imagine male farmers branching out, taking their farming practices, language and genetic variation with them. But a significant expansion of people would seem to need both sexes to reproduce and last more than a generation.

“In the end,” Kemp says, “it’s kind of a frustrating conclusion.”

Geologist and science scribe Kirsten Peters regularly writes on the art and science of discovery for her Rock Doc column, syndicated in newspapers across the country and available at rockdoc.wsu.edu. Her latest column, a service of the College of Sciences at Washington State University, marvels at the man widely considered the Father of the Scientific Method.

Sometimes it pays to spend ten years in detention. Not that a person would ever want that to happen, but if it did – could you put the time to good use?

That’s a question I’ve asked myself. I’ve also asked my students exactly the same thing. The value of a good high school or college education, I say to them, is that it should give you the tools to use time like that well. What would you do with it?

One thousand years ago an Arab man named Ibn al-Haytham found himself under house arrest in Cairo. That far back ago in time, we don’t know much of the specifics of Ibn al-Haytham’s life. But we do know he was a towering giant of an intellectual in his day.

If you give a thinking person ten years to think, don’t be surprised if there are some powerful results in the end. In Ibn al-Haytham’s case, a good argument can be made that the ten-year gap in his life was quickly followed by the release of his major book on optics. That book was pivotal to our lives today, because optics was hardly the only issue it addressed.

In the ancient world – more than 1,000 years before Ibn al-Haytham’s own life – Greek philosophers had two main theories of vision. One theory (advanced by Ptolemy and Euclid) was that “vision rays” left the eye and went out to objects around us in the world. The other was put forward by Aristotle. The great philosopher had argued a “form” of some sort comes from an object in the world around you and enters your eye so you can see it.

Ibn al-Haytham pointed out, first, that not all the ancient Greek authorities could be right, since they followed two contradictory ideas on the subject. Then he noted that we don’t have vision unless there is light around us: either light from the object we are seeing (like a lamp) or light rays from reflected light (like sunlight in the day). So light, first, is what we need to understand in order to better understand vision.

Using only logic like this and a few simple experimental materials – a pinhole in a curtain or a hollow straight tube – Ibn al-Haytham went on to deduce a great deal about modern optics. Light rays travel in straight lines. Light on flat mirrors is reflected in one set of ways, and on curved mirrors in others.  Light is refracted (bent) when it moves from air to water.

Most importantly of all, Ibn al Haytham did all this good work using experiments and observations, writing out for his readers what they could do to show themselves the same evidence he had seen and reach the same conclusions.

That’s not bad for 10 years of work under nice conditions. For 10 years in detention, it’s really a remarkable feat.

Two hundred years passed after the death of the Arab scholar before a Christian monk took up a translated volume of the work and saw its value. Roger Bacon was our hero’s name. He was not Francis Bacon – there are two Bacons rattling around in history. Roger Bacon repeated some of Ibn al-Haytham’s experiments – but he also endorsed for the Christian tradition this new method of gaining new knowledge about the natural world. Experiments and testing of physical facts, Bacon argued, were the most productive ways to learn about the physical world around us. Others around Bacon were soon on board with the program, and Medieval Europe began to have at least an inkling of the modern, scientific method.

The reason science and engineering have been able to progress so much in our lifetimes is that the method of running experiments and testing results is enormously successful.  But in the old world, it was far from clear that this approach would lead to the most sound results.

We owe Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon a lot, not just for their good work on optics, but for recognizing the power of the scientific method that has given us so much today.

In the winter of 2003, a large herd of bison in an Idaho feedlot was cut in half when a disease outbreak swept through, killing 825 animals.

Two years ago, 19 cattle, most owned by FFA students, died after being shown in Washington’s Puyallup State Fair.

In both instances, Washington State University researchers determined the animals died of malignant catarrhal fever because they had been kept near flocks of sheep, which routinely carry a disease called ovine herpes virus 2. Researchers have known of the disease for decades, but have repeatedly been frustrated in their attempts to grow it in a lab—a major step in developing a vaccine.

So they use the next best thing to a Petri dish: sheep.

USDA and WSU researchers, writing in an upcoming issue of the journal Veterinary Microbiology, say they have propagated the virus in sheep and for the first time identified specific cells where it can replicate. Their discovery opens the door for growing these cells and the virus in a laboratory setting, where they can then begin developing vaccines.

Naomi Taus, lead author and veterinary medical officer for the Pullman unit of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, says she and her colleagues collected secretions from sheep—snot, actually—and aerosolized it to expose other sheep. They then took tissue samples from the sheep and searched for infections by looking for fluorescent markers designed to bind with proteins associated with the virus and certain cell types.

It turns out the virus is entering the sheep at the deepest levels of the lungs in what’s called a type II alveolar epithelial cell—a cell related to skin cells.

Researchers now hope to culture and manipulate these cells in a laboratory setting—a real Petri dish—to develop a vaccine that can be used by the bison industry.

Taus, N.S., Schneider, D.A., Oaks, J.L., Yan, H.,Gailbreath, K.L., Knowles, D.P., Li, H., Sheep (Ovis aries) airway epithelial cells support ovine herpesvirus 2 lytic replication in vivo, Veterinary Microbiology (2008),doi:10.1016/j.vetmic.2010.03.013

The dust has settled from the Pacific Northwest timber wars of the 1990s, but the perception still lingers that the endangered species listing of the spotted owl was a job killer.
Look again, says Annabel Kirschner, a professor in Washington State University’s Department of Community and Rural Sociology.
Writing in the latest Social Science Journal, Kirschner says the owl listing and subsequent logging reductions did not significantly increase unemployment and poverty on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.
Her analysis shows the peninsula was already hard hit by changes in the timber industry when harvest limits in spotted owl habitat began in the 1990s. More than timber limits, the industry restructuring continued to affect poverty in the ‘90s. Meanwhile, Native American and Latino populations were significant and often overlooked factors in the peninsula’s poverty and unemployment.
“During the spotted owl debate, almost no attention was paid to the presence of minorities on the peninsula,” Kirschner writes. “…This is a weakness of much poverty research in rural areas, and this finding emphasizes the importance of considering the presence of these populations in rural areas when considering well-being.”
The paper certainly paints a different picture of the controversy. Back in the early ‘90s, media coverage focused on loggers and businesses who posted signs saying they were “supported by timber dollars.” But in Kirschner’s analysis, the region is increasingly supported by service industries, increasing education levels, a near doubling of commuting opportunities, and retirement incomes. Meanwhile, those in the most dire straits are Native Americans or Latinos, whose population grew by more than 140 percent in the ‘90s.

Kirschner, A.R. Understanding poverty and unemployment on the Olympic Peninsula after the Spotted Owl. The Social Science Journal (2010), doi: 10.1016/j.soscij.2009.11.002.